The Diplomat
The Council of Justice and Home Affairs Ministers of the European Union, meeting until yesterday in Luxembourg, has approved an agreement on asylum and migration rules that introduces “a new simple, predictable and workable solidarity mechanism”. Both the Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, and the European Commission consider that this agreement, which combines obligation with flexibility, “paves the way” for the approval of the Pact on Migration and Asylum before the European elections in June 2024.
The Council agreed on a negotiating position on the Regulation on Asylum Procedures and the Regulation on Asylum and Migration Management. The agreement, reached this week by the 27 after years of negotiations and rejected only by Hungary and Poland, will form the basis for the Council Presidency’s negotiations with the European Parliament.
This regulation establishes a common EU-wide procedure for member states to follow when someone applies for international protection, simplifies procedural provisions and lays down rules on the rights of the asylum seeker. In addition, the Council establishes a “new simple, predictable and workable solidarity mechanism” to “balance the current system whereby a few Member States are responsible for the vast majority of asylum applications”. This mechanism, which will be activated to respond to countries “at high risk”, is based on a combination of mandatory solidarity with flexibility for Member States to decide on individual contributions.
Specifically, a minimum threshold of 30,000 migrants per year is set for the activation of the mechanism and, under the so-called “solidarity à la carte”, countries that do not wish to take in the allocated quota of persons must pay a minimum compensation of €20,000 for each migrant or applicant who has not been relocated to their territory. Member States have full discretion as to the type of solidarity with which they contribute and no Member State will in any case be obliged to carry out relocations.
Following the approval of this mechanism, the Minister of the Interior told his counterparts that the new European migration regulation is a “resounding success” and “a major step towards giving Europe a more efficient, more solidarity-based and fairer asylum and migration system”. The new document, in his opinion, guarantees the equitable distribution of responsibility in migratory matters and is based on solidarity, a principle that appears for the first time in a legal instrument of the EU and that is “an inalienable issue for countries like Spain, exposed to intense migratory flows as the external border of the European Union”.
Likewise, Grande-Marlaska urged his counterparts to continue the roadmap drawn up in 2019 with the European Parliament to complete the negotiations of the Pact on Migration and Asylum before the end of the European legislature, in June 2024, and affirmed that this agreement “paves the way for the approval of the Pact, a top priority for the EU as a whole and also for the Spanish Presidency that we will assume as of July 1”.
In the same vein, the European Commissioner for Home Affairs, Ylva Johansson, said yesterday that it is “absolutely possible” that governments and the European Parliament reach an agreement to fully reform migration and asylum policy in the EU before the European elections. “It has been blocked in the Council since 2016, but now we have a very strong majority position and it is not so far from what the European Commission proposed,” she said on her arrival at the second day of the Council of EU interior and justice ministers in Luxembourg.
